A Galaxy S6 With (Almost) Stock Android Sounds Like A Dream Come True

There are some pretty unsubstantiated and vague rumours that Samsung's new Galaxy S6 won't just have a new Note-inspired hardware design; it will also have less ugly TouchWiz skinning than ever. Who knows if this is true! It's probably not. But man, it still sounds fantastic.

The rumour comes by way of an unnamed industry source that told Business Korea, "We are aiming to get rid of unnecessary functions and simplify our UI at the level of Google's Nexus 6." Whoa if true, amirite?

Samsung's gross, cluttered, performance-hampering TouchWiz skin has been a pox upon its otherwise great hardware for ages, but also one that Samsung has been reluctant to give up. After all, TouchWiz is what makes a Samsung phone look like a Samsung phone, which is to say ugly.

The Galaxy S6 is due to be Samsung's first new flagship smallphone, adopting the same new industrial design seen on the underspec'd Galaxy Alpha and the gargantuan Note 4. That means it's bound to be beautiful, unlike the bandaid-inspired S5. And if that impeccable hardware was paired with a clean user experience with little (or none?!) of Samsung's characteristically horrible TouchWiz in the way? Considering the S line has a history of great screens, top of the line guts, replaceable batteries, and microSD expansion slots -- aka "good hardware all around" -- we're coming up on Dream Phone territory here.

And you don't even need to scrap the whole TouchWiz adventure. Samsung's gotten good at adding value to phones, especially the larger ones, with features you can't find in stock Android, like windowed apps. If Samsung could find a nice middle ground by keeping handy add-ons like easily accessible volume options, multi-window support, and apps you can minimize into little floating icons, while cutting out just about everything else, we could have a winner on our hands.

Samsung's been slowly paring Touchwiz down into something more palatable, but there's still a long way to go. Whether the S6 will set a new record for "least TouchWiz" is still up in the air, but here's to hoping. [Business Korea]

Top image: Galaxy Alpha, which is probably kinda sorta hopefully similar to what the S6 will look like.